The New Enemies List

Benjamin Domench is is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and publisher of The Federalist.

Domenech joined Heartland in 2009 after several years working and writing on national health care policy, beginning with a political appointment as speechwriter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, and continuing as chief speechwriter for U.S. Senator John Cornyn during the Medicare Part D debate on Capitol Hill.

In addition to his work with Heartland and The Federalist, Domenech is the publisher of a daily subscription newsletter, The Transom, which is read daily by thousands of political insiders.

Domenech co-founded Redstate andhosts a popular podcast on market issues in the global economy -- and for which he won a "Sammy" award in 2011 — called Coffee & Markets.

In 2009 he was selected as a Journalism Fellow by the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution.

The firestorm around the White House is only going to grow with the knowledge that the administration targeted Fox News’ reporter James Rosen for doing nothing more than being a reporter. Kirsten Powers:

“Turns out it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to “delegitimize” a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters. In between, the Obama administration found time to relentlessly persecute government whistleblowers and publicly harass and condemn a private American citizen for expressing his constitutionally protected speech in the form of an anti-Islam YouTube video. Where were the media when all this began happening? With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.”

Ryan Lizza’s frustration is evident here. For members of the media, the warrant to essentially invade every aspect of Rosen’s life – private email accounts and more – is a chilling read.

The White House knew about the IRS scandal far earlier than it first acknowledged – but senior staff reportedly decided to keep the president in a bubble.

“The White House says McDonough and the other advisers did not tell President Barack Obama about the impending report, leaving him to learn the results from news reports later. The White House defended the decision to keep the president in the dark, with press secretary Jay Carney saying Obama was comfortable with the fact that “some matters are not appropriate to convey to him, and this is one of them.”

Here again the White House has been inconsistent – Reid Epstein counts five different versions of their storyline. That’s sure to quiet the questions from the media

“That February, True the Vote received a third request for information from the IRS, which also sent its first questionnaire to King Street Patriots. Catherine says the IRS had “hundreds of questions — hundreds and hundreds of questions.”

The IRS requested every Facebook post and Tweet she had ever written. She received questions about her family, whether she’d ever run for political office, and which organizations she had spoken t0. On the same day they received the questions from the IRS, Catherine says, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) launched an unscheduled audit of their machine shop, forcing the Engelbrechts to drop everything planned for that day. Though the Engelbrechts have a Class 7 license, which allows them to make component parts for guns, they do not manufacture firearms. Catherine said that while the ATF had a right to conduct the audit, “it was odd that they did it completely unannounced, and they took five, six hours… It was so extensive. It just felt kind of weird.”

What’s disturbing about the Engelbrecht story is how government agencies impact every arena of life and work – there is no escaping it. And this is not a new problem, or one tied to the federal government alone, as John Kass notes.

“One Sunday, I must have been 12 or 13, I decided to ask what I thought was an intelligent question that was something like this: We talk politics every Sunday, we fight about this and that, so why aren’t you politically active outside? Why don’t you get involved in politics? There was an immediate silence. The older cousins looked away. The aunts and uncles stared at me in horror, as if I’d just announced I was selling heroin after school. You could hear them breathing. No one spoke. I could feel myself blushing… I couldn’t understand how we could argue about politics over baklava and watermelon and coffee, but not put it into practice. We could support a political candidacy, we could donate or work for one or another politician that we agreed with. This is America, I said. “Are you in your good senses?” said my father. “We have lives here. We have businesses. If we get involved in politics, they will ruin us.”

At its root, James Taranto sees these scandals as the consequence of too much moral crusading in our politics.

“Today’s liberal left conceives of itself as being on the side of all that is good, right and reasonable. It caricatures the right as racist, extremist, greedy, dishonest, fanatically religious, prone to violence – and dangerous because, through the Republican Party, it has maintained parity in the political arena. Of the 10 presidential elections since Watergate, each party won 5; and voters haven’t entrusted the Democrats with full control of government for more than two years since the Carter era. If ordinary politics are a battle between good and evil, then winning becomes an overriding moral imperative. The end justifies the means.”

And that problem goes deeper than just one president – it is a cultural trend which rots the foundation of the public square.